Modern storage systems store many different types of objects (e.g. text files, XML files, image files, video files, etc.). With the proliferation of social networking and other technologies that increase the ease and capabilities with which users may share information, sharing information between geographically dispersed users has rapidly increased and the demand for efficient, lightweight storage of digital images in particular has rapidly increased.
To maintain near instantaneous access to photos and other objects, storage systems must constantly store higher volumes of information while constantly improving access rates to these higher volumes of information. Various methods have been proposed and implemented to store more information (e.g. deduplication) and improve access rates (e.g. use solid-state drives), but very few solutions have taken advantage of the unique storage and retrieval requirements for photographs.
There is a need, therefore, for an improved method, article of manufacture, and apparatus for content storage and retrieval that takes advantage of this unique characteristic of photo storage.